Armadillo Aerospace News: Electronics work, Engine problems

Because we had to put the flight computer on the charger several times during testing last Saturday, I replaced the main battery with a new one nearly three times as large. That took a fair amount of rearranging on the electronics board, but it should allow us to have the computer on for almost six hours without a problem. Our electronics are all still on the circular board that was originally intended for the 2’ diameter vehicle, even though it looks like we are probably never going to fly that configuration. I will probably wind up rebuilding it on a new mounting board the next time we make a major change.I finally figured out why I couldn’t get the four port serial board working with the Ampro CPU board: the highly integrated board only has two free IRQ available in the default configuration, one of which wasn’t available on the serial port board. The Ampro won’t let anything else on the PC104 stack fire an interrupt that it might, even if you aren’t using that particular device, like the floppy or LPT port. The latest bios flash lets you disable the LPT port to get another one back, which I will have to do for the next serial port I need (or mess with the linux kernel to get shared IRQ working with the WinSystems four port board). I am looking forward to moving to the latest Ampro CoreModule board, which includes four rs232 ports on the CPU board. That will cut our PC104 stack to only two boards, the Ampro and the AccessIO A/D + DIO board. Read More